Posted elsewhere but would like explained like I’m 5.
What I can’t get my head around is: I had 2 parents, they had 4 (in total) who would have had 8 in a geometric progression, so going back even 1000 years or 20 generations (assuming an average lifespan of 50 years) is 2,097,152 ancestors for just me, and given that there is a reported 7.9 billion people on earth alive today it seems mathematically impossible that all those people could have existed.
In: 7
You share a lot of those ancestors with other people. I have 2 parents, and my sister has 2 parents, but that doesn’t mean that 4 people needed to exist. It’s just the same 2 people for both of us. Likewise your last 500 ancestors are also the ancestors of thousands of other people too.
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